My Brain, in a box

In 2001, I was a trainee at a Tier 1 automotive supplier. My first real job.

My task? Fix SAP data integrity for 12,000 components.

It was manual. It was tedious. It involved spreadsheets that scrolled until my eyes watered. But it taught me spome of the most critical lesson of my career… It just took a while to realise most of them…

Procurement’s biggest problem isn’t the work. It’s proving the work matters.

Fast forward 20 years. I’ve worked in automotive, telecommunications, utilities, and government. I’ve been the junior and the leader, been a consultant and a fixer.

And in all that time, I watched the same pattern repeat like a bad sitcom rerun:

• The Crisis: A stakeholder screams that Procurement is a bottleneck/cost-cutter/policy police.

• The Reaction: We hire a consultant (someone like me) to diagnose the problem.

• The Process: I spend 3 months interviewing stakeholders, running surveys, and analysing spend data.

• The Output: I deliver a 100-page report that says: “Your stakeholders want you to be more strategic, and your suppliers feel squeezed.”

• The Drift: The report sits in a drawer. Two years later, we do it all again.

The Definition of Insanity

As a consultant, this model is lucrative. As a professional, it’s frustrating.

I realised I was writing the same recommendations, for different clients, over and over again. Whether it was a category strategy or an operating model review. Same stuff, tweaked story. The problem wasn’t that we didn’t know what to do. The problem was that the cost of diagnosis was so high (in time and money) that we treated strategy as a “special event” rather than a daily habit.

We measure financial savings continuously. But we measure sentiment, risk, and strategic value episodically—usually when it’s already too late.

So, I Stuck My Brain in a Box

I decided to stop being the bottleneck.

I took the methodology I’ve used for two years—the interview questions, the survey logic, the risk weighting, the strategic frameworks—and I codified them.

I built ProcureValue.

It’s not just a survey tool. Survey tools ask questions; they don’t know what the answers mean.

ProcureValue is a diagnostic engine. It’s my consulting brain, stripped of the hourly rate and the coffee breaks, put into a SaaS box.

It asks the right questions: Not generic “How are we doing?” fluff, but targeted questions that expose the gap between cost and value.

It analyses the friction: It spots when Finance loves you but Operations hates you, and tells you why.

It drafts the strategy: It takes that data and writes the “First Cut” of your category strategy, complete with drafting notes on where the conflicts lie.

From Consulting to Scaling

I’m not quitting consulting. Humans are still needed to navigate the politics, manage the change and make the hard calls.

But humans shouldn’t be doing the data gathering. Humans shouldn’t be formatting Word documents. And humans definitely shouldn’t be charging obsurd amounts to collate survey results in Excel.

I built this tool so you can get the diagnosis in weeks, not months, repeatedly.

So you can stop starting from a blank page.

And so you can spend your budget on fixing the problems, rather than just paying someone to tell you they exist.

The Beta is Open.

If you want to see what happens when you automate the “boring” part of strategy, I’m looking for 3 Founding Partners to test the system.

Let’s see if my brain in a box is as useful as the real thing. (It’s certainly cheaper).